The Oral Epic

From Performance to Interpretation

Karl Reichl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000409208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This book focuses on the performance of oral epics and explores the significance of performance features for the interpretation of epic poetry.

The leading question of the book is how the socio-cultural context of performance and the various performance elements contribute to the meaning of oral epics. This is a question which not only concerns epics collected from living oral tradition, but which is also of importance for the understanding of the epics of antiquity and the Middle Ages which originated and flourished in an oral milieu.

The book is based on fieldwork in the still vibrant oral traditions of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia. The discussion combines fieldwork with theory; it is not limited to Turkic epics but branches out into other oral traditions.

Part I
Settings

1 How to Identify an Oral Epic

In the disputable and usually futile task of classifying the forms of poetry there is no great quarrel about the epic.

(C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton)

In Plato’s dialogue Laches, Socrates asks the question: ‘What is courage?’ Laches, a Greek general during the Peloponnesian war, is quick to give his answer: ‘Why really, Socrates, it’s not hard to say: if someone is willing to stay in ranks and ward off the enemy and not flee, rest assured he is courageous.’ Socrates is not pleased with this reply. Instead of defining courage, Laches and also the other participants in the dialogue give examples of what they consider courageous behaviour. Socrates was not asking for examples, but for a definition. His goal was to work out the idea (eidos) of courage.

The ‘idea of the epic’ has been elaborated since the beginning of Western literary criticism in Aristotle’s Poetics. With the Homeric poems as models, Aristotle stated that the epic is representational (mimētikē) and narrative (diēgēmatikē), in metre (en metrō) and of a certain length (mēkos); like tragedy it is a representation of heroic action (mimēsis spoudaiōn). With variations and specifications Aristotle’s definition has survived until today. Bowra could confidently say that ‘there is no great quarrel about the epic’ and continue by defining the epic along Aristotelian lines as follows: ‘An epic poem is by common consent a narrative of some length and deals with events which have a certain grandeur and importance and come from a life of action, especially of violent action such as war.’ Other scholars, as for instance J. B. Hainsworth in his book The Idea of Epic, base their studies on fundamentally the same principles.¹ This is not to say that Aristotle has held sway in genre theory unchallenged. The epic has received attention in Western thinking from Hegel to György Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin, and also structuralism has left its imprint on modern theorizing, with studies on genre by Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette, and Jacques Derrida, to mention only some.² Dissenting voices can also be heard from scholars in the fields of folklore and cultural anthropology, who argue against an understanding of genre entirely based on Western literature.

Oral: Shades and Grades

Before I address some of the problems raised by looking beyond the confines of Western literature, I will briefly comment on the qualification ‘oral’. Oral poetry is oral first of all in the etymological sense of the word ‘oral’: it is ‘mouthed’ poetry, poetry spoken, recited, or sung. Its primary reception is aural, that is, that of poetry which is listened to rather than read. Not all orally performed and aurally received poetry, however, is oral in the sense we understand the word when we speak of oral poetry. A recital of Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ is oral, but the song is not an oral poem. Oral poetry is not only orally performed, but also orally transmitted. This means that a song or a narrative is learned by word of mouth in a chain of oral transmission, not just from one person to another. Typical examples of oral transmission are the ‘singers’ schools’ discussed in Chapter 2. Oral transmission does not exclude the existence of written texts, which might be diffused parallel to oral transmission or might even be the ultimate source of an orally performed and transmitted poem, but the emphasis is on oral in the transmission process. Typically folksongs in non-urbanized, traditionally oriented societies are transmitted orally, rather than memorized from a printed text. This is true of the ballads collected by Cecil Sharp in the Appalachians at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is axiomatic of the songs collected from societies where literacy is rare or even non-existent, as in the songs discussed in Maurice Bowra’s Primitive Song or the songs collected by Raymond Firth from the Tikopia on the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean.³ Songs of this kind were not only transmitted orally, but also composed orally, without the help of writing. Oral composition can mean the spontaneous improvisation of songs, such as the contest songs popular among the Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples, but the term is not co-extensive with that of improvisation. We know that oral poets have often spent time and energy on composing, polishing, and elaborating their works of oral art.⁴

Oral composition is not synonymous with what Albert Lord calls ‘composition in performance’, by which he means the ability of singer-narrators to perform an oral epic smoothly and fluently, not on account of a great power of memorization, but on the basis of their ability to weave a poem together from various building blocks, in particular formulaic lines and expressions and so-called ‘themes’, that is, motifs and typical passages or scenes. His definition of the oral epic, at least in the case of the South Slavic epic tradition, incorporates the concept of composition in performance:

Stated briefly, oral epic song is narrative poetry composed in a manner evolved over many generations by singers of tales who did not know how to write; it consists of the building of metrical lines and half lines by means of formulas and formulaic expressions and of the building of songs by the use of themes. This is the technical sense in which I shall use the word ‘oral’ and ‘oral epic’ in this book.⁵

The concept of composition in performance underestimates the importance of verbal recall in the training situation on the one hand and on the other has a tendency to minimize the creative power of singers, reducing their art to a mechanical combination of pre-fabricated elements.⁶ Furthermore, in an article entitled ‘How Oral is Oral Literature?’, Ruth Finnegan argues that the puristic view of orality as expounded by Lord in his Singer of Tales is not tenable. It does not conform to reality. The illiterate singer of tales who has acquired his epic songs from the oral performances of other singers and has no written version of his song is a marginal rather than a typical case. In reality, oral and written traditions keep crossing paths, and it is therefore perhaps preferable to talk of an oral-literate continuum. She notes that ‘the relation between oral and written forms need not just be one of parallel and independent coexistence, far less of mutual exclusion, but can easily exhibit constant and positive interaction’.⁷

This is certainly true. As to oral transmission, even in traditional societies, for instance in Central Asia a century ago, literacy was not totally uncommon among epic singers, and today it is, of course, the norm. Some of the works performed by these singers were available in manuscript or print and even used in performance in some local traditions. Moreover, both in Central Asia and in other parts of the world we find the public ‘reader of tales’ as an alternative or supplement to the singer of tales (see Chapter 2). The impingement of written texts on oral transmission is particularly noticeable in the epic subgenre of romance. In some cases writing is, for instance, also used in the learning process. The Iranian storytellers (naqqāl) who perform episodes from the Persian national epic Shāh-nāma (‘The Book of Kings’ by Firdausī, c. 1000 CE) must as students with a master singer not only memorize passages from the epic, ‘but the student must also copy and learn the tumār, which he receives from his teacher. This tumār is a story outline in prose of the episodes making up the stories he will tell.’⁸ Nigel Phillips, in his study of the oral epic tradition of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, mentions that in the predominantly oral tuition of singers, some used written sources when learning the epic. (1981: 13–14)

There can be no doubt about the interaction of oral and written transmission in many of the oral epic traditions that have stayed alive to this day or came to an end in the course of the twentieth century. It is, however, equally undeniable that the ideal case – oral perfo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Note on Transcription and Transliteration
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Settings
• Part II: Performance
• Part III: Interpretation
• Appendix A: Notes on Oral Epic Traditions
• Appendix B: Audio/Video Examples
• Appendix C: Discography
• Glossary of Musical Terms and Non-Western Instruments
• Bibliography
• Index